Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Druff looked at each of his escorts and opened the door. It hadn’t even closed behind him before Rose Helen began to speak.

“What’s different about me? Can you say, can you tell? No, don’t look at my hair, it isn’t my hair. Why do boys always look at your hair when a girl asks that question?” She was addressing the two witnesses at his back behind the screen door. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you a hint. It’s something you wear but it isn’t clothes.” He examined her scrupulously. “Oh, Robert,” she said, “you’re so dense!”

“It’s your pin. You’re not wearing your sorority pin,” the waiter said.

“Who’s that, Edward? Good for you, Edward. You’re absolutely right.” She suddenly sounded to him like the schoolteacher she would one day be. “Well, I’ve done it,” she said.

“They make you turn those things back in if you resign?”

“Please,” Druff said, “we’re having a private conversation.”

“Sorry,” the waiter said, injured, “sometimes it’s hard to know what’s private and what isn’t.” Druff remembered he’d once tried to describe to Edward the taste of her breasts, the smell of her damp pants on his fingers, the odd feel of a particular softness here, the compensatory muscularity somewhere else from the exercises she continued to perform for her hip, her spine, stretching and bending herself, he supposed, like one doing farm work, forking hay, maybe.

“So,” she said, “I’ve voluntarily deconsecrated myself. I’ve left the Chi Phi’s. I’m an Independent now, too.”

Now they were sunk, he thought. She didn’t sound sunk, but now they were sunk. He wouldn’t taste those breasts again until they were married. (At least it wasn’t the furniture, he told himself. I’m not that bad, at least. At least most of my disappointment has to do with the fear of not being alone with her.)

She started to come the rest of the way up the ramp but Druff went to meet her. He began to walk with her toward the Student Union. “Here,” she said, when they had gone about half a block, “you wear this.” She took her sorority pin from her purse and pinned it to his shirt.

“So,” Druff said, “they don’t make you give them back.”

“Nope, that one’s bought and paid for. It’s free and clear. I burned the mortgage on that pin when I quit the Chi Phi’s.”

“Usually,” Druff said, “when pins are exchanged it means you’re going steady.”

“It means you’re engaged to be married,” she said. “It means you have children together. It means forsaking all others. It means till death us do part.”

“I don’t have any pin,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re this quote Independent unquote. You’ve probably your own weird customs. You’ll teach them to me.”

He gave her the waiter, he gave her Edward (as he had given parts of Rose Helen to the waiter). They still didn’t know any other couples, they still didn’t double-date, but they had a sidekick now, a squire, a retainer, a factotum, this best-man-in-waiting, this in-the-wings witness, their sworn fifth wheel and interested second party, someone to backstage for them and legitimate their love, make it interesting enough, dramatic enough, their own personal second-banana man, Edward R. Markey, with his name like a clerk of the court or some high-up in the Motor Vehicles Bureau, the man who signs the driver’s licenses, or the State Treasurer, say. (Druff enjoyed believing that the waiter was a little in love with her himself, or even with Druff in some safe, charming, companionable way which didn’t threaten anyone, even the faithful retainer. He thought of him, early on, as he would have thought of a devoted theatrical manager, some mysteriously womanless, childless, unfamilied — unsibling’d and, for all he knew, motherless, fatherless, perhaps even cousinless — bachelorly man whose only interest was that they — the two principals — not ever suffer.)

She’d taken a room off campus, in town, in enemy territory, behind the lines, near the railroad station, not far from that diner where they’d gone the time Rose Helen had sobbed to him, confessing her suspicion that she’d made Chi Phi Kappa because of what she called her “sanitary deformity,” something between a pledge and a housemother, who did for them, a kind of dobbin, a sort of Edward herself, the patron saint of their vocabulary lists, of their mending and hairdos, Cinderella without the fairy godmother, a fairy godmother herself, theirs, or at least their fairy good sport.

She’d taken a room off campus.

Strictly speaking, it was an illegal address; unauthorized, non-university housing, not the apartment that undergraduate girls weren’t permitted to lease, and not even the boardinghouse — no meals were served — about which she entertained so many fancy, romantic notions, but a furnished room in what wasn’t even a rooming house for an exclusively female clientele. The house where Rose Helen stayed had as many men living in it as women — railroad employees, conductors and engine drivers, switchmen and gandy dancers. The women in the house were mostly students at a local college for beauticians; some were wives from the nearby air base whose enlisted-men husbands, still receiving their training, were permitted to leave the base only on weekends. Two or three Druff recognized from the Student Union Building, cashiers, food handlers.

“What do you think?” Rose Helen asked him.

“How did you get this place? You’re not allowed to live here. They could withhold your credits.”

“I never gave the university a change of address.”

“Suppose they have to get in touch with you?”

“Why would they have to get in touch with me? I lived at Chi Phi Kappa almost two years, they never had to get in touch with me.”

“What about mail?”

“Edward’s there for lunch, he can bring it to me.”

“It’s beautiful,” Druff said. “It’s really nice.”

It really was. His standard was the rooms at Mrs. Reese’s, his own, Edward’s, the three or four others he’d visited since coming to the university. His standard was the small study rooms with their typing tables and desk lamps, their wooden chairs and narrow cots.

There was a double bed with a pale, flowered spread across it, a small sofa, a ladder-back rocker, a stripped dresser with a pitcher and washstand on it. There was a closet. There was a painting, a pleasant landscape, not a reproduction but an actual oil. There were lamps, plants, hooked rugs, lace curtains on Rose Helen’s two big southern-exposed windows.

He heard someone coming up the stairs.

“Am I supposed to be in here?”

“It’s Edward,” Edward called, “with the rest of your things.”

“That was a close one,” Druff said to Rose Helen.

“Why a close one?”

“Well,” he said again, “am I supposed to be in here?”

“The landlady never said anything about visitors,” Rose Helen told him. “All she ever said was that the railroad workers come in at all hours, that they sleep when they can. All she said was that I have to be considerate of my neighbors, to play my radio low even during the day.”

Her room was beautiful, it really was. Still, he felt he was a thousand miles from a grand piano, big stately furniture, Oriental rugs, civilization. He felt like an outlaw.

The stairs and hallways, the rooms and shared baths, even Rose Helen’s landlady’s — Mrs. Green’s — apartment (where the television was which they were invited to watch with her: it was an early color set, an experimental model Mrs. Green’s boyfriend, an electrical engineer, possibly a married man, had given to her; only a handful of color transmissions a year were sent out at that time, and Druff remembered seeing the first lecture ever televised in color, the first-ever color telecast of a polo match, the announcers reporting all this solemnly, the commissioner reminded — now, not then — of those other almanac occasions to which he’d given credence, the Groundhog Days and leap years, Sadie Hawkinses and the various solstices, of all bloodless, neutered history) always smelled of pork chops, frying meat. (Mrs. Green permitted tenants to store food in her kitchen. There was a hot plate in Rose Helen’s room but she used it only to boil the tan beef and pale, mustard- colored chicken bouillon cubes and black coffee she drank, and to heat up the food, the almost untouched leftovers Edward stole from the Chi Phi Kappa house and gave Druff to bring to her, or brought her himself, and on which she lived.)